Surprise: Last night’s SOTU ratings the lowest of Obama’s presidency

posted at 8:01 pm on January 29, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

America didn’t really care to show up to watch the fifth iteration of a now over-hyped D.C. ritual chock-full of recycled platitudes from an uninspired president only halfheartedly fighting back the throes of an imminent lame-duckery of his own making? …Weird.

The ratings are in, and they’re not pretty: the yearly speech got its lowest ratings since 2000.

The 2014 State of the Union got 33.3 million viewers, according to Nielsen figures. That is the smallest audience Obama has gotten since he took office in 2009. In comparison, Obama’s highest-rated State of the Union address was in 2009 when he drew 52.4 million viewers. Viewership has declined every year since then, and 2014′s speech was down from 33.5 million last year.

Meanwhile, President Bush’s smallest audience for a State of the Union was 37.5 million in 2008. President Clinton’s was 31.5 million in 2000 — the lowest State of the Union ratings, as the Daily Caller pointed out, since Nielsen began tracking them in 1993.

The numbers aren’t much lower than last year’s (and some of them could be getting siphoned off by all of the Internet-viewing options that abound these days), but it is quite the drawdown from the heights of Hopenchange, and O’s sagging approval ratings of late would probably suggest that nobody is finding renewed interest in the thought of spending their evening watching the president wearily deliver the same piece of political theater they’ve already heard umpteen times before. Obama Fatigue is real, and if this keeps up — especially if the Democrats lose the Senate this fall and Obama really finds himself dead in the water — I shudder to think about how much more depressing this banal rhetorical exercise can get. I’d wager that it won’t be long before he’s giving President Clinton a run for his money.

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Tea party stalwart Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., says she was hoping the House could pass legislation to sue the president if he took too big of a legislative leap without Congress.

“The president renewed his commitment that he was going to be King Obama. This is something that is really frightening to the American people,” Bachmann says, pledging to advance legislation and file a lawsuit against the president.

Initially, Pratt said she noticed that her insurance premiums went down — $14 per month to be exact. She received a 30-or-so-page booklet detailing in small print the changes to her plan that would come under Obamacare. But she didn’t look closely enough to avoid her recent sticker shock.

Last week Pratt visited her primary care physician with a sore throat. It was strep. At the receptionist’s window and afterward at the pharmacy to fill a prescription, Pratt learned just how much more she would be paying for care.

“My copay for seeing the doctor went up $30 to $60. My copay for prescriptions went up $20 to $60 as well,” Pratt told TheBlaze.

But that’s not even the kicker. Having an MRI, something Pratt will need once a year for the next five years to monitor her brain, went from an $800 copay to $2,200

[But you can't fix stupid:]

“The Affordable Care Act in general, I think, it’s a great idea, but the road to hell is paved in good intentions. I don’t think they expected the fallout from business in general,” she said.

The audience for “president” Obama’s speech last night was likely astronomically huge but uncounted.

For example, all those cars littering I-75 in Atlanta. They weren’t there because of the freak snowstorm. No. They were there because of the freak in the White House.

As the time for the telecast approached, those drivers abandoned their vehicles and beat a path to nearby bars, malls, hotel lobbies, airports, anyplace where there might be a public big-screen tuned to the “president” — that eager were they to glimpse his beautiful and reassuring visage in their time of turmoil.

So, if you include these millions of extra viewers, you learn — and I’m sure Nonpartisan would agree — that the audience for “president” Obama’s investment seminar drew an even more off-the-charts massive audience than did Obama’s first such event five years ago.

This proves that Obama is more popular and beloved than ever. It’s high time we faced reality and admitted these facts.

Obama is now in “syndicated re-run territory” of a show that no one wants to watch because the original series left viewers feeling dissatisfied once they found out they were being manipulated by a really bad plot.

The 2014 State of the Union got 33.3 million viewers, according to Nielsen figures. That is the smallest audience Obama has gotten since he took office in 2009. In comparison, Obama’s highest-rated State of the Union address was in 2009 when he drew 52.4 million viewers. Viewership has declined every year since then, and 2014′s speech was down from 33.5 million last year.

Obama’s explanation: 200,000 people fainted from the sheer awesomeness of his speech, leaving only 33.3 million to watch the whole thing.